"Bushwick Es Mio:" Gentrification and the Emotional Displacement of Latinas

Bard College Bard Digital Commons Senior Projects Spring 2014 Bard Undergraduate Senior Projects Spring 2014 "Bushwick was Mine," "Bushwick es mio:" Gentrification and the Emotional Displacement of Latinas Rosemary Ferreira Bard College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/senproj_s2014 Part of the Urban Studies and Planning Commons This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Recommended Citation Ferreira, Rosemary, ""Bushwick was Mine," "Bushwick es mio:" Gentrification and the Emotional Displacement of Latinas" (2014). Senior Projects Spring 2014. 12. https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/senproj_s2014/12 This Open Access work is protected by copyright and/or related rights. It has been provided to you by Bard College's Stevenson Library with permission from the rights-holder(s). You are free to use this work in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights- holder(s) directly, unless additional rights are indicated by a Creative Commons license in the record and/or on the work itself. For more information, please contact [email protected]. “Bushwick was Mine,” “Bushwick es mio”: Gentrification and the Emotional Displacement of Latinas Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College by Rosemary Ferreira Annandale-on-Hudson, New York April 2014 For my mother, Maria Ferreira, And for all immigrant women, Whose calloused hands and broken backs Carried us to where we stand now Acknowledgements To the women who participated in this study, thank you. This project would not have touched me as greatly if I had not thought of it as a platform to share your resilient stories. To Angel Vera and others at the Make the Road New York office, thank you for connecting me to many of the women I spoke with and for being such kind and sincere people. To my adviser Clement Thery, the rest of my Senior Project board, Yuval Elmelech and Myra Armstead, and to other Bard professors who have opened my eyes to new ways of thinking about the world, Jonathan Anjaria, Ken Haig, Maria Cecire, Nancy Leonard, Melanie Nicolson, Nicole Caso, and Miles Rodriguez, I am grateful to have attended an institution that allowed me to be in classrooms with such brilliance, thank you. To my BEOP family, beginning with the Directors and Assistant Directors, Ariana Stokas, Jane Duffstein, Rafael Rodriguez, and Brandon Brown. Thank you for providing me with unwavering academic and personal support these past years. As I enter the next chapter of my life, I look to all of you as great leaders and mentors who have impacted the lives of hundreds of students. Jane, you are, and will continue to be, the backbone of BEOP to me. Thank you. To the rest of my family at Bard, Ismary Blanco, Carmen Rodriguez, Maria Hoz, Nushrat Hoque, Amy Mariano, Christiane Koffi, Yvonna Groom, Kathy Garzon, Jon Chavez, Karimah Shabazz, Durante Barringer, Dana Miranda, and to my friends back at home, Maigon Nobbs, Michelle Viteri, and Fernanda Acosta, thank you. You have all seen me at my highest and at my lowest in these past four years and have loved me anyway. I can’t ask for more from such amazing friends. To Ayda Ninoska Gonzalez. Yes, you get your own separate paragraph. Ayda, I never quite experienced the beauty of sisterhood until I met you. You are a light that shines through all of my darkest days. Thank you for loving me unconditionally. To Mami, Papi, Dioni, Jose, Yesenia, and Jesmarie, you have all molded me into the woman I am today. I can only hope that I have made you proud of me. Table of Contents Introduction 1 I. Jane Jacobs in Bushwick: How Young Women Find Latino Identity on the Street 15 II. “I’m Not a Fucking Museum”: Young Women’s Perception of Gentrification 29 III. The Stakes of the Street: Older Women and Public Space 47 IV. A traves de la lucha: The Development of Latinidad in Older Women 60 Conclusion 78 Bibliography 81 Introduction Inner City Latinas and Emotional Displacement Latinas residing in the American inner city confront various obstacles to meet their basic needs and prosper in their disinvested communities. In the U.S., Latinas, along with black and Native American women, are more likely to experience the destabilizing effects of poverty, sexual violence, racial discrimination, underfunded schools, and the prison industrial complex in their lives than white women (National Women’s Law Center, 2013, Byrant-Davis et.al, 2009, Guerino, et. al, 2009). The constraints Latinas and other women of color face have developed from a historically hostile political and economic state that consistently misrepresents and devalues the bodies and lifestyles of Latinas as sexual deviants and welfare queens (Collins 2005, hooks 1981, Roberts 1998). The stigma constructed around Latinas is not only grounded in their physical bodies and moral character but is also geographically situated within the confines of the “inner city,” a euphemism used to describe impoverished communities of color living in the central areas of American cities. As the place of residence for many Latinas, the city was perceived as the locus of poverty and crime in the American imaginary. With the rise of globalization and the growth in the service industries of finance and real estate over the past couple of decades, there has been a slow yet definite shift in the representation of many American cities. Cities are now conceptualized by local public officials and large economic interests as centralized sites for global capital. This representative shift, however, has not erased the spatial and socio-economic inequities that mark the urban landscape. The city has become increasingly polarized as high- profit professionals and low-income marginalized immigrant workers, in particular Latinas, compete over urban public space (Sassen 2005). The term gentrification is utilized in both academic and public discourses to describe the process in which the reinvestment of the inner 1 city by large cyclical movements of capital has altered the urban class structure, introducing an influx of middle-class professionals and severely displacing existing working-class residents (Lees et.al. 2007, Slater 2011). Beyond this macro approach to gentrification, little has been written on its impact on the lives of those who experience it at its most local level, working-class Latinas. By solely framing gentrification under the context of large political and economic forces, studies on this phenomenon fail to acknowledge how gentrification is intimately experienced in the lives of marginalized working-class communities. Although gentrification in U.S. cities has significantly altered the social and physical landscapes in which urban Latinas live, gentrification is not mentioned as a severe constraint impacting their livelihood. This work seeks to fill in the gap by placing Latinas and their everyday experiences with gentrification into broader political and economic contexts. From Class to Gender, Sexuality, Race, and Class Although an often-contested definition, gentrification is understood here as a class-based transformation in which the physical, social, and economic qualities of working-class neighborhoods are revalued and reinvested in by the middle-class and larger political and economic interests. Through collaborative reinvestment projects between the local political elite and global business interests, the spatial, social, political, and economic components of the inner city have been restructured to meet the needs of high-profit service industries (Smith 1986, Logan and Molotch, 1987). This elite set of public and private partners have altered the urban landscape, enticing a whiter, educated, and more affluent class of “gentrifiers” to work and live in the inner city. Gentrifiers have proven to be powerful in their consumption capabilities. Their search for “authentic” places, rich with diversity and a sense of community, has created a large 2 demand amongst many young, professional and middle-class individuals for housing and entertainment areas in the inner city that are then supplied by political and economic actors interested in generating profit. Inherent in the coinage of the term gentrification by Ruth Glass in the 1960s is the notion of class conflict in the urban socio-spatial arena. The term captures the class inequities that plague capitalist urban real estate markets. The two decades after Glass’ coinage of the term consisted of heavy contention over the term’s viability in defining what was occurring in the inner city. The works of various neoclassical economists in the 1970s rejected the term gentrification and with it, its implication of class inequality (Lipton 1977, Schill and Nathan 1983). Instead, they redefined what was occurring in the inner city as the “redevelopment” of urban areas by the invisible forces of the market. Such a development was to be celebrated as the reemergence of valuable and profitable cities for middle-class professionals in the midst of urban decay and poverty (Slater 2011). The demand and supply side arguments that would come to dominate the gentrification discourse in the 1980s were both responses to the neoclassical approach that simplified what was occurring in the inner city as a byproduct of the natural forces of the market. Both sides of the gentrification debate attempted to reemphasize the definition of the phenomenon as a multifaceted process that was simultaneously reshaping socio-cultural dynamics at the local neighborhood level and the occupational structure and real estate market at the global level. Where the two sides of the gentrification debate differ is in where and with whom they place power and agency in the processes of gentrification. Demand side scholars focused specifically on the “gentrifiers” as a distinct group produced from changes in the occupational structure and the cultural environment.

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